


My Favorite Things

by DonnesCafe



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Episode: s03e03 His Last Vow, Fix-It, Fluff and Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-03
Updated: 2014-03-03
Packaged: 2018-01-14 10:52:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1263598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DonnesCafe/pseuds/DonnesCafe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thanks to Mary, Sherlock is seemingly comatose in the hospital. He needs to focus...</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Favorite Things

“Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens….”

Something niggled at the border of his consciousness. Whiskers on kittens? He tried to concentrate.

“Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens….”

Why did John have Julie Bloody Andrews on in the next room? John watched rugby. He watched various boring sports teams do whatever it was they did and the occasional military history documentary.  Less often a movie or an inane reality drama-fest. _The Sound of Music_? He would never…. Wait… he deduced, he deduced… He felt strangely foggy. He deduced that Mrs. Hudson was watching Julie Bloody Andrews in their flat.

“Cream colored ponies and crisp apple streudels…” He started to open his mouth to yell at her to turn off the sodding telly. He hesitated. John wouldn’t want to him to say ‘sodding’ to Mrs. Hudson. Or yell. He would get up, go into the lounge, and ask her quite gently to…. So he got up. But no. His legs weren’t obeying him. Come to think of it, he couldn’t feel his legs. Dreaming?

“Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles….” Bollocks. Even in the depths of his subconscious mind, sleigh bells didn’t come into it. Think. Where was he? He could hear. Couldn’t move though; and, he just realized, he couldn’t see.

“Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings….” He tried to roll his eyes, but he didn’t think he had been successful. Where was he? He felt strangely agitated. He heard a beep. He could hear. He could also smell. What was that smell? Astringent, antiseptic, cleaning fluid, isopropyl alcohol. Hospital. Something beeped again.

“Sowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes….” Mary. Mary Morstan. Watson, he corrected himself. Something beeped again. The intervals between beeps decreased. “Silver white winters that melt into springs…” Had. Shot. Him.

“These are a few of my favorite thiiiiings….” Hospital. A nurse must have turned on the television. Obviously a nurse that didn’t know him.

She had shot him. Mary, not the nurse. He felt a surge of adrenaline course through him. He couldn’t move. More beeps. “When the dog bites, when the bee stings….” Bloody hell. Was he in hell? He didn’t believe in hell. He was in hospital, so he was alive. For now. He had to get to John, had to warn him. But he couldn’t move. He tried to call for someone. Couldn’t speak. He had to stay calm, had to think. He was

“When I’m feeling sad….”

sad. Afraid. Helpless. Coma? Damn and blast. He tried to think, but his thoughts fractured before the fact that he had been wrong about almost everything.

“I simply remember my favorite things….” He had to remain calm. Favorite things. He could make a list, gather the threads of himself back, come back. Ten. He would do ten. Ten favorite things. That was a logical number. Focus.

One. One, he told himself. He felt himself drifting down, away from… He couldn’t even hear Julie Bloody Andrews anymore. Not good. One…. Ah, interesting corpses. Definitely a favorite thing. Puzzles laid out before him. No-one ever understood that his glee when standing over an interesting corpse wasn’t ghoulish. They weren’t people anymore. Not people who could feel pain, who could feel fear or longing or regret. Just collections of clues.

Two. Yes, this was good. He felt calmer. Two. His coat. Coats. He had two just in case. His coat was armour, comfort, convenience, identity. It protected him from the cold. He always flipped the collar up to protect his face from the cold and from eyes, eyes that might catch the wrong expression on his face. Expressions of regret or pity when he looked down at the collection of clues that had been a human being. A person who had felt longing, joy, love, regret. His coats were part of his persona and they were stylish. He loved his coats.

Three. Easy. 221B Baker Street. It suited him down to the ground. Good location, plenty of room for his experiments. He could be himself there, away from the prying eyes of …. Almost everyone. When John lived there, he hadn't fussed overmuch about the microscope and Bunsen burner on the kitchen table, and now it didn't matter anyway. He could keep body parts in the fridge, although Mrs. Hudson feigned horror. He knew she was much more inured to violence than she liked to let on.

Four. Mrs. Hudson. This was becoming easier than he had expected. Well, she wasn’t a thing, but he supposed people counted. When they had first met over the little matter of her horrific husband, her fluttering had bothered him. He was concerned that she wasn’t strong enough that do what had to be done. But his superficial deductions about her on first meeting had proved…. superficial. Mrs. Hudson was a rock. Also an irritant, trying to get him to eat and sleep more. But she loved him. Love. He really must get a hold on himself, he thought. Love was…. But he was alone here in his coma. Or whatever it was. He could admit that he loved her in return. He couldn't imagine ever saying it, but he thought she knew. He always wondered if she was on Mycroft’s payroll, though. She wasn’t well off, and maybe some of the fussing was because….

Five, he thought grimly. Really, this was child’s play. He felt his mind focusing and getting sharper. He felt calmer. Irritating Mycroft was one of his absolute favorite things. Goading Mycroft had been an amusement since he was quite, quite small. The thing about piracy, for instance. Mycroft thought he was serious. He had been six and Mycroft had been at Eton. His brother had been home for the holidays and had told Sherlock that he would enjoy Eton, that it would be a challenge. How little his brother knew him. He already knew he would hate it and that the only challenge would be surviving until he was old enough to get out on his own. He told Mycroft this. The thirteen-year-old Mycroft had quirked a superior brow at him. Yes, he did it even then. “And what career do you propose if you don’t go to Eton? To university?” “I’m going to be a pirate,” he had said, schooling his face into complete seriousness. He could do it even then. How little either one of them had changed. “Nonsense, there are no pirates anymore.” “Of course there are,” he had replied, “they run drugs for one thing.”

Six. Drugs. He sighed. Definitely one of his favorite things. They calmed him when he was agitated, stilled the ravenings of a mind that needed stimulation. More and more stimulation. They helped him over the depressions. The black, black hole that sucked him in more often than anyone knew. The drugs that Lestrade still suspected he took from time to time.

Seven. Lestrade. Maybe people were safer. Even though they weren’t, technically, things. Lestrade thought he didn’t know his first name. Greg. Gregory. Of course he knew it, but needling Lestrade was one of his favorite things, next to needling Mycroft. He liked Lestrade, respected him, held him in esteem. Affection even. But it wouldn’t do for the last thing to be too obvious. Might upset the balance of their working relationship. So he called him Geoff, Godfrey, Garreth, Gavyn. He was running out of the obvious ones. If he called Lestrade Giancarlo or Gunnar, the game would be up.

Eight. The Game. He loved the game. The game was running around with John, solving crimes. It was so much more fun with John. An audience was good. And John had turned out to be surprisingly useful in a pinch. You wouldn’t think it to look at him, but he could be quite brave. And ruthless. John…

Nine. John. Back to people. He felt a stab of pain. He could feel pain. This was good. Very good. He didn’t think he would feel pain if he were in a coma. He had to get up, had to warn John. The list. Stay with the list. It seemed to be working. John. He loved John. He had said so during his excruciating speech at the wedding. Excruciating, like the pain he was feeling now. Both times he had felt it in the chest. Meaning the bullet and the love. During the speech because he had decided that on the most important day of John’s life he owed him some human honesty. When John had asked him to be best man, John told him that he was one of the two people he loved most in all the world. He hadn't known that. He had known that he loved John of course. But he had walled that part of himself effectively away. He wasn’t the sort of person that people loved, mostly. He knew how irritating he was, how different. He didn’t expect to be loved. His didn't think his parents had loved him. They were always kind to him. Concerned. He was labelled early by the doctors as a high-functioning sociopath. Other labels too tedious to recall. His parents were wrapped up in each other, and he hadn't been easy to love anyway. They thought he couldn't love. But he did. With a passion and a steadfastness that would have surprised

Waves of pain now. Agonizing. Very, very good. He didn’t think this pain was coming from his love of John. It was because Mary Bloody Morstan... Watson, he corrected... had shot him in the chest. Loving had not proved useful in his life or career, so he had banked it down. No need for anyone to know. But John had told him he loved him. It seemed wrong on his special day not to actually say what was in his heart. The formal demands of the speech and the public forum somehow made it safer for him to say what was in the heart that no-one thought he had. Then there had been all the sniffling. He had kept his face carefully neutral, using long practice to hide his own emotion. The mask almost slipped when he heard Mrs. Hudson’s tearful, “Oh, Sherlock.”  She loved him, he knew, but then Mrs. Hudson loved almost everybody.

Ten. His life. The waves threatened to drag him down again. Dark agony, fear, betrayal. Something... someone... whispered, "Just let go. Let go." Focus. His life. He realized that he loved his life. He didn’t, in fact, feel so sad. Inane song, but actually useful. In spite of everything. In spite of his horrendous childhood, his lingering addictions, his problematic relationship with his high-handed older brother, the challenges of his own demons, his many demons, and the challenge of what to do about Mary, the challenge of what to do about John. He loved his life. He loved tea with John and shooting bullets into the wallpaper and Molly and Angelo and Greg and Mrs. Hudson and his skull and his violin and keeping John awake with his violin and dinner at Angelo’s even if he never ate it and even (God help him, but of course there wasn't a God) Mycroft and, of course, John. Always John. He loved his life. He refused to let go.

He heard a voice. “Sherlock…. You don’t tell John. Look at me….”

They would just see about that.


End file.
